really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies. He then goes through the other four aggregates, one by one. “If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,” and you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.” But, of course, we don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings—hence the tendency of unpleasant feelings to linger even though we’d rather they didn’t.† So feeling, the Buddha concludes, “is not-self.” So too with perceptions,
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